Passages, Warsaw and New York-based artist Maria Kozak’s second exhibition with Dreamsong features a series of new oil on linen and burlap paintings alongside an artist-made wooden room divider. Cataloguing states of metamorphosis, Kozak mines the history of German Expressionism in moody, diaphanous paintings that explore the psychic and emotional toll of transition. Alluding to the gap between the world’s material reality and our perception thereof, The Map and the Territory (which borrows its title from Michel Houellebecq’s novel), a dual sided divider, shows several figures in various states of corporality atop shifting grounds of pink, green and cobalt blue. In A Bad Case of the Stripes, a young man peeks through a trompe l’oeil curtain spanning the entire canvas, half-hidden from the waiting world. Capturing both the precarity of liminality and its sheer strangeness, Kozak’s vertiginous paintings materialize the disorientation of the precipice, aptly responding to a world in a state of dizzying flux.

DREAMSONG is pleased to announce Day After Day, the gallery’s inaugural solo exhibition with Los Angeles-based painter Rema Ghuloum (b. 1978, North Hollywood, CA). Comprised of six new abstract paintings and a series of the artist’s Rain drawings, the paintings in Day After Day frame layered and sanded veils of oil paint within thickly impastoed borders, transforming a series of discreet, meditative gestures into contrasting plays of light, shadow and color that unfold with the sublime depth of landscape. Emphasizing the physicality of feeling and emotion, Ghuloum uses surface tension and contrasting colors to evoke, hold and reconcile opposing sensations. A practitioner of Reiki healing and other meditative rituals, the artist’s approach to painting is similarly focused on process and presentness, favoring a series of proscribed actions in lieu of a predefined compositional goal.